 Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, and Mrs. Reagan. Mr. President, Mrs. Reagan, General Ballantyne, distinguished guests up on their diets, and all of you distinguished people out there, including from foreign countries. And I say distinguished because anyone who comes in today to help us celebrate this day in my book are distinguished guests. At this time, I would ask each and every one of you to rise, remain standing until the flags are marched in, the Pledge of Allegiance, National Anthem, and the invocation. Will you please rise. The Pledge of Allegiance by the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. To support and assist the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Corporation in conducting this time. By permission of the President, I'm going to call the names of the foreign countries who are visiting with us here today. I'm taking it alphabetically without giving any names. From Canada, the President of the United States. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Today is the day we put aside to remember fallen heroes and to pray that no heroes will ever have to die for us again. It's a day of thanks for the valor of others. A day to remember the splendor of America and those of our children who rest in this cemetery and others. It's a day to be with the family and remember. I was thinking this morning that across the country, children and their parents will be going to the town parade, and the young ones will sit on the sidewalks and wave their flags as the band goes by. Later maybe they'll have a cookout or a day at the beach, and that's good. Because today is a day to be with the family and to remember. Arlington, this place of so many memories, is a fitting place for some remembering. So many wonderful men and women rest here. Men and women who led colorful, vivid and passionate lives. There are the greats of the military, Bull Halsey and the admirals Leahy, father and son, Blackjack Pershing, and the G.I.'s General Omar Bradley. Great men all, military men. But there are others here known for other things. Here in Arlington rests a sharecropper's son who became a hero to a lonely people. Joe Lewis came from nowhere, but he knew how to fight. And he galvanized a nation in the days after Pearl Harbor when he put on the uniform of his country and said, I know we'll win because we're on God's side. Audie Murphy is here. Audie Murphy of the Wild, Wild Courage. But what else would you call it when a man bounds to the top of a disabled tank, stops an enemy advance, saves lives and rallies his men in all of it single-handedly? When he radioed for artillery support and was asked how close the enemy was to his position, he said, wait a minute and I'll let you speak to them. Michael Smith is here in Dick's Gobi, both of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Their courage wasn't wild, but thoughtful. The mature and measured courage of career professionals who took prudent risks for great reward, in their case to advance the sum total of knowledge in the world. They are only the latest to rest here. They join other great explorers with names like Grissom and Chafee. Oliver Wendell Holmes is here, the great jurist and fighter for the right. A poet searching for an image of true majesty could not rest until he seized on Holmes' dissenting in a sorted age. Young Holmes served in the Civil War. He might have been thinking of the crosses and stars of Arlington when he wrote, at the grave of a hero we end not with sorrow at the inevitable loss, but with the contagion of his courage and with the kind of desperate joy we go back to the fight. Well, all of these men were different, but they shared this in common. They loved America very much. There was nothing they wouldn't do for, and they loved with the sureness of the young. It's hard not to think of the young in a place like this, for it's the young who do the fighting and dying when a peace fails and a war begins. Not far from here is the statue of the three servicemen, the three fighting boys of Vietnam. It too has majesty and more. Perhaps you've seen it, three rough boys walking together looking ahead with a steady gaze. There's something wounded about them, a kind of resigned toughness, but there's an unexpected tenderness too. At first you don't really notice, but then you see it. The three are touching each other as if they're supporting each other, helping each other on. I know that many veterans of Vietnam will gather today, some of them perhaps by the wall, and they're still helping each other on. They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam, boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war. It was the un-pampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us, they learned to rely on each other, and they were special in another way. They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age. They stood for something, and we owe them something. Those boys, we owe them first a promise that just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither ever will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and perhaps a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges, and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. That, of course, is the lesson of this century, a lesson learned in the Sudetenland, in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Cambodia. If we really care about peace, we must stay strong. If we really care about peace, we must through our strength demonstrate our unwillingness to accept an ending of the peace. We must be strong enough to create peace where it does not exist and strong enough to protect it where it does. That's the lesson of this century and I think of this day. That's all I wanted to say. The rest of my contribution is to leave this great place to its peace, a peace it has earned. Thank all of you and God bless you and have a day full of memories. Now I have a selection by the Marine Band. In this observance, no forum.